Book of the Day: Reinventing Discovery – The New Era of Networked Science

Summary

In Reinventing Discovery, Michael Nielsen argues that we are living at the dawn of the most dramatic change in science in more than 300 years. This change is being driven by powerful new cognitive tools, enabled by the internet, which are greatly accelerating scientific discovery. There are many books about how the internet is changing business or the workplace or government. But this is the first book about something much more fundamental: how the internet is transforming the nature of our collective intelligence and how we understand the world.

Reinventing Discovery tells the exciting story of an unprecedented new era of networked science. We learn, for example, how mathematicians in the Polymath Project are spontaneously coming together to collaborate online, tackling and rapidly demolishing previously unsolved problems. We learn how 250,000 amateur astronomers are working together in a project called Galaxy Zoo to understand the large-scale structure of the Universe, and how they are making astonishing discoveries, including an entirely new kind of galaxy. These efforts are just a small part of the larger story told in this book–the story of how scientists are using the internet to dramatically expand our problem-solving ability and increase our combined brainpower.

This is a book for anyone who wants to understand how the online world is revolutionizing scientific discovery today–and why the revolution is just beginning.

Michael Nielsen is one of the pioneers of quantum computing. He is an essayist, speaker, and advocate of open science.

“Nielsen is one of a growing band who believe that there is a mine of untapped knowledge online. He describes the potential of the “semantic web”, built from data rather than words, and explains how information scientists are starting to detect new patterns in this data. This is how Don Swanson, with no medical training, discovered a link between migraines and magnesium. It is how Google is able to track the spread of flu by analysing search terms and to translate our web pages using its vast quantities of linguistic data.

The argument for openness is not just one of efficiency. It is also about science’s social standing. The scientists behind the human genome project, led by John Sulston, conquered their own proprietary instincts to demand full publication of all genome data. Data for the flu virus, however, is fragmented and guarded. So while Google roars ahead, epidemiologists struggle to track and combat flu infections.

Nielsen’s anger is palpable: “We have an opportunity to change the way knowledge is constructed. But the scientific community, which ought to be in the vanguard, is instead bringing up the rear.” His prescription is pragmatic, more carrot than stick. Force scientists to share and they will share badly; give them incentives to do so and they will see its value. He describes some design principles for open science that explain why efforts such as Tim Gowers’s Polymath project have been such a success (27 mathematicians co-operating online took a month to prove a theorem that had baffled individual mathematicians), while others have become online ghost towns.

Nielsen is a physicist, and was a wunderkind of quantum computing, before he took leave under George Soros’s patronage to write this book. At times he betrays a physicist’s naivety about the complexity of knowledge. He is happier discussing amateur stargazers and online chess games than recent bust-ups over the MMR vaccine and “Climategate”. In the life sciences, data is often messier, stakes are often higher and much of the knowledge that needs to be shared may be tacit, impossible to write down and expensive to share. For biologists, intellectual property increasingly chokes the free exchange of ideas. But this must not become an excuse for inaction.

Science has progressive ends, but conservative means. Scientists see their methods as the root of their authority and they guard them jealously. Nielsen asks scientists to reinvent what they do, for the good of science and the good of society. His call to arms is timely and important.”

1 Comment →Book of the Day: Reinventing Discovery – The New Era of Networked Science

I would like to add another dimension to this topic, knowledge transfer from academia to local economies.

While the higher administrative layers of Universities are still pushing for commercializing intellectual property, we (SENSORICA) find through our practice that scientists are more and more inclined to open their innovation, and to integrate “value networks” that bridge the academia with the local economy. SENSORICA value network already includes 2 academic laboratories, one at Montreal Heart Institute and the other one at Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal. We helped these labs to get funding for projects developed within SENSORICA. We observe a rich interaction between professors and their students and SENSORICA members. Knowledge, know how, and tangible resources are flowing both ways between SENSORICA and these labs. Both these relations seem to be strengthening for a long-term collaboration.

SENSORICA’s value proposition to professors in the academia is straight forward: We (SENSORICA) want to develop open innovation, which adds no constraints to publication, allowing the lab to increase its scientific reputation and to get more funding in the traditional way. Moreover, we add value to the lab’s research by developing new applications. We also help the lab to build the case for funding. All funding goes to the lab and knowledge and know how flows into SENSORICA. SENSORICA members also gain access to expensive equipment.

In conclusion, value networks are becoming important channels for technology transfer. University professors prefer to integrate a value network like SENSORICA, rather than working with corporations or patenting their technology. The value network is a new form of organization enabled by the Internet and the digital technology built around it.

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Comment

Name *

Email *

Website

Notify me of follow-up comments by email.

Notify me of new posts by email.

WRITTEN BY

Franco Iacomella

Franco Iacomella is an Argentine scholar (involved in universities such as the University of Buenos Aires, Latin American Social Sciences Institute and the Open University of Catalonia) and Free Culture advocate.More: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franco_Iacomella

Join us!

The European Commons Assembly is sharing visions and strategies around the commons in Europe. Join us in supporting the development of a flexible network to connect activists across issues and to mobilize them to impact European policy. Click here for more info.